HEMET: Man linked to anti-Islam video says he has had death threats

The Hemet man who was a consultant to an anti-Muslim film that has sparked rioting in nearly 20 countries said he has received multiple death threats.

“I’m really tired,” Steven Klein said when he answered the door of his home Friday, Sept. 14, with a pistol in his hand and clad only in a pair of white shorts stained with what appeared to be ink spots.

Klein, an ex-Marine and Vietnam veteran, appeared agitated.

While waving the gun, he said he was standing up for his First Amendment rights in helping with the film.

He said he is prepared to die for those rights.

Klein was a script adviser for “Innocence of Muslims,” which mocks the Prophet Mohammad and presents him as a womanizer, pedophile and thug.

Muslims have attacked U.S. and European embassies and consulates in several countries to express outrage over the video. A 14-minute trailer of the video has gone viral on YouTube.

The filmmaker, a Cerritos man named Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, has gone into hiding. But Klein has given interviews to a number of media outlets this week, including The Press-Enterprise.

On Friday, Klein at first agreed to another interview but changed his mind.

Klein, who owns a Hemet insurance agency, said Wednesday he has been an anti-Islam activist for more than a decade.

He has a satellite-television show in which he has discussed his disdain for Islam.

“I hate Islam,” Klein said in an Aug. 30 broadcast of his “Wake up America” show on The Way TV, an Arab Christian station based in the San Gabriel Valley city of Duarte. “I don’t ever want to see it (Islam) again.”

Klein and his supporters have distributed virulently anti-Islam leaflets outside mosques throughout California and at dozens of Southern California high schools, including campuses in Temecula, Murrieta, Corona, Norco and Menifee.

The handouts say Mohammad had sex with children, committed incest and participated in genocide.

Officials at some of the schools where Klein and other members of a group he founded, Concerned Citizens for the First Amendment, distributed his literature said they didn’t remember any problems or objections to his presence on public property outside the school.

During the Aug. 30 “Wake up America” episode, Klein talked of the “courage and vision” of Joseph Nasrallah, the president of Media for Christ, which produces The Way TV.

“Innocence of Muslims” was shot at Media for Christ offices, the chief electrician for the video told The Associated Press.

Media for Christ was listed as the production company for the film.

The Aug. 30 “Wake up America” episode opens with scenes in Egypt, where the minority Coptic Christians have faced persecution, including deadly attacks on their churches. The clips include a Muslim religious figure cursing Christians and Jews and a woman who said Muslims kidnapped her 5daughter.

“This is what we can expect to see in America in the next two or three, four generations, what this poor lady is going through, and the Muslims wanting to kill everybody,” Klein said on the program. “That’s just how Islam works. They’re power, money and sex.”

Later in the broadcast, Klein brags that he has multiple guns in his home and office.

“All the Muslims know that,” he said. “They never mess with me.”

He then introduces a video clip of a man shooting guns while country music plays in the background.

“This is going to be the ultimate solution to the Muslims,” Klein said as he introduced the clip.

Klein talks of how his son was blown up by a suicide bomber — Matthew Klein was seriously injured in Iraq in 2007, according to the Army Human Resources Command — and said, “The Lord Jesus Christ has caused me to be a terrorist to the terrorists.”

Steven Klein’s mother said Friday she is worried someone may try to hurt her son.

“He’s a wonderful American and he’s pouring his heart out for America,” Shirley Klein said from her home near Carson City, Nev.

It was unclear whether Klein has reported threats against him to Hemet police, which did not return phone calls Friday.

In addition to receiving threats, Steven Klein said Friday that “the FBI is all over me.”

FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller declined to confirm whether the agency has interviewed Klein. But she said the FBI is following leads in the United States and abroad as part of its investigation of Tuesday’s murder of four U.S. diplomats, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, during an attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

The assault on the consulate occurred during protests against the video.

Jim Horn, a Menifee man who helped Klein pass out the anti-Muslim leaflets at high schools and spoke out against a new mosque in Temecula, said Klein told him this week that the FBI advised him to leave his Hemet home. But Klein is not intimidated by the death threats, said Horn, who last spoke with Klein on Friday morning, Sept. 14.

Horn, 70, said Klein told him that Nakoula — whom Horn and Klein know by the pseudonym “Sam Bacile” — had gone into hiding.

Nakoula is worried about being questioned by the FBI, because the FBI has Arab Muslim employees who would then divulge his whereabouts to a Muslim organization, Horn said. That group would then contact someone who would likely kill Nakoula, he said.

“He has no confidence in the FBI protecting him, and that’s understandable,” Horn said.

Klein said Wednesday he has never assaulted anyone during his anti-Muslim activism.

But according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups, Klein runs militia drills at the Church of Kaweah in the Central California community of Three Rivers.

Although the church has attempted to distance itself from Klein, Heidi Beirich said the information about his training there came from the church’s website and its radio show.

Those references did not appear on the websites Friday.

According to the center, Klein runs the drills with the Christian Guardians, a San Francisco-based group.

“The trainings are preparation for what the organizers say is a pending war with Muslim sleeper cells,” Beirich said.

An email message to Christian Guardians and a phone call to the church’s pastor, Warren Mark Campbell, were not returned Friday.

Hussam Ayloush, executive director of the Greater Los Angeles chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said he has been aware of Klein’s anti-Muslim activities for several years.

Ayloush lives in Corona and said his daughter was handed an anti-Muslim leaflet while outside Santiago High School.

He said he knew Klein and others had been distributing anti-Islam leaflets at mosques and high schools in the Inland area and elsewhere. He believes Klein’s leafleting at mosques — which Klein said was to educate Muslims about the truth of Islam — was intended to provoke Muslims to react violently. Ayloush said he is unaware of any violence.

He said he opted to not publicize Klein’s actions, to avoid giving attention to his cause. Ayloush’s photo appears on one of the leaflets, which link Ayloush and the council to the Muslim Brotherhood. Ayloush said the allegation is false.

He drew parallels between Klein and those who killed the U.S. diplomats. They are extremists who believe in violent inter-religious battles rather than the goal of interfaith harmony, he said.

“They both exploit our patriotism, our nationalism, our religious feelings,” Ayloush said. “They are part of a tiny minority who believe in a clash of civilizations. They need each other. Without each other, their reason for existence goes away.”